House sales down, yet optimism up

Rosangel Toledo and her husband, Tomas Rivera, have left their noisy, heavily trafficked Bronx neighborhood for a home at the end of a tree-lined Chester cul-de-sac.

James Walsh

Rosangel Toledo and her husband, Tomas Rivera, have left their noisy, heavily trafficked Bronx neighborhood for a home at the end of a tree-lined Chester cul-de-sac.

"I like hearing the birds," said Rivera, a bus operator for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. "It reminds me of my hometown in Puerto Rico."

The couple was moving in last week, unpacking boxes of belongings stacked in the garage. Realtors hope to see more buyers like them in the third quarter to compensate for a lackluster spring.

Single-family house sales in Orange County dropped in the second quarter compared to a year earlier, while the inventory of houses on the market grew by nearly 20 percent during the same time period.

Figures from the Hudson Gateway Association of Realtors showed 3,023 houses waiting for buyers at the end of June. The number was 2,522 at the same time last year.

Sales, meanwhile, fell 12 percent, and the median price was down 3 percent.

The severe winter delayed searches by prospective buyers, the Realtor's group speculated. Ulster and Sullivan real estate professionals found that the wintry conditions blocked access to some rural houses.

The association also saw the housing supply jump in response to an inventory of distressed properties.

Realtor Chris Scibelli of Keller Williams Realty in Highland Mills said one out of every five transactions at his office involves a distressed property.

"And the process of going through foreclosure, short sale or modification, hasn't gotten any easier," he said.

Yet, Scibelli was confident the inventory will drop because many properties have contracts pending, and sales were likely to rebound as interest rates remain at near-historic lows.

The Ulster County Board of Realtors recorded a 4 percent sales decline. The median price in Ulster dipped a little more than 1 percent during the same period.

Some sales indicated the highest end of the market, which has been the slowest to recover from the mortgage debacle, might be awakening. Scibelli says he's seen sales of $750,000 and more.

"It seems the more discretionary buyer is seeing the value of some of these high-end properties that have been on the market for quite a while," he said.

Pricing, though, remained a key to sales, said Marion Bruhns, associate broker at Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty in Pine Bush. Price is especially important when there are many properties competing for attention.

"I feel pricing is the most critical factor," Bruhns said. "If you price your home right, not only will it sell, but I've had multiple-bid situations."

Price was indeed important to Toledo and Rivera, who paid about $250,000 for their three-bedroom split-level house. Toledo was determined to avoid the crisis of foreclosure so many other first-time buyers have faced.

"I told the person preparing the mortgage that I didn't want something that I couldn't pay," she said. "The important thing for us was to have an affordable monthly payment."

She smiles when recalling her instructions to Robert Rullo, her representative at Keller Williams.

"I said don't show me anything I can't afford because I might like it too much," Toledo said.

The couple has two children, Angelica, 4, and Brianna, 1, so the quality of the schools was also important. Their new home is in the Monroe-Woodbury School District. They considered buying in the Bogota, N.J., area, but Chester won out because friends and relatives live nearby.

"Now was the right time for us," said Toledo, a social worker in New York City. "We were pre-approved by the bank in January, and we started looking in February. Now our girls can go to the best schools, and here we have plenty of peace and quiet."